Once when Marya slept out in the truck her father had found her. It was freezing cold: her teeth chattered and her fingers and toes were turning blue. Her father hadn’t been angry, in fact he had laughed, poking his head and shoulders through the rust-rimmed window of the truck to peer at her upside down. “Hey, what’s this? What the hell kind of hiding place is this?” Marya was his favorite, he liked to run his fingers through her curly hair, playing a little rough, teasing: but he never meant to make her cry when he was teasing. Another time, though, Marya’s mother was the one to find her in the truck and she hadn’t thought it was funny at all. It was a new trick of Marya’s. Something Marya did to spite her, to shame her. Another thing that required punishment—a succession of hard quick slaps, a blow to the buttocks with her fist. “We’re not animals,” Marya’s mother said, her face flushed dark with blood, “we don’t sleep out in the fields like animals!”

In Shaheen Falls they stared, they talked, and Marya’s mother knew though she couldn’t always hear. Such people, they said, hill people, whispering, staring. Marya was lost in Woolworth’s, separated from her mother and Davy, so she ran up and down the aisles, wild, panting, half sobbing, bumping into people, pushing her way through a knot of women shoppers, using her fists, even butting with her head. “Isn’t she a little savage,” someone said in disgust, “just look at her, those eyes. . . .”

Marya clapped her hands over her eyes and disappeared: she couldn’t see anybody then and they couldn’t see her. She just disappeared—the way dreams do when a light is switched on.

“Wake up,” Marya’s mother was saying.

“Wake up,” she said, her voice rising impatiently, “we’re going out.”

Marya heard the rain still hammering on the roof, dripping from the eaves. At the corner of the house the rain barrel would be overflowing. The smells were of tarpaper, asbestos siding, kerosene, rain-rotted wood. . . .

Marya was watching her father back out of the driveway, one arm on the back of the seat, the other snaked around the steering wheel. He gunned the motor so hard that the Chevy’s chassis rocked and the rear bumper struck the gravel. She and Davy were playing in the rain, trying to jump over the longest puddle without getting their feet wet; but they were already wet. When the mud dried on Marya’s legs she picked it off like scabs, which was maybe why her mother was so angry. “Stop touching yourself, stop picking at yourself, you kids are driving me crazy—”

Marya’s mother was hunched over the bed, shaking her by the shoulders. The overhead light that Marya hated had been switched on, a single naked bulb that made her eyes ache.